Notices by emily, emitter of spooky noise (emily@sparkly.uni.horse), page 4

also found this invest-in-startups thing via Purism using them, which says I should consider investing in wine or art (https://www.startengine.com/blog/collectibles/)

I don't know why I find this so funny

it's time for my annual hardware review, in which I iterate through all the categories of devices I really want to give people money for, and see if anyone has made one yet that fulfills my fairly short requirements lists:
- non-Android non-iOS smartphone that can be bought with the expectation of using it as a handheld communication device and not an OS beta testing device
- non-cloud robot lawnmower that can handle a nontrivially-sized, US-typical lawn, and is not comically expensive
- stretch goal (I don't actively want them for any particular reason but I want them to exist and would play with one given the chance): AR/VR devices that are just displays and input devices and not a whole Ecosystem

you may notice I use "non" and "not" a lot in these descriptions. this is because my technology requirements really are largely gathered by looking at things and going "ugh, not that"

things robot lawnmower reviewers care about:
- did the reviewer like the app
- making stripes on your lawn
- avoiding children

things I care about:
- please do not make me use an app
- making the grass shorter
- scaring children away

happy to mod the last one in myself by drawing a scary face on it, if they give me an appropriately large surface to do so on

oh shit someone took a big bite out of the sun

happy cathursday

happy warm kitty

it has been 0 days since I had to drill out a tiny hex head screw that became a circle head screw

*orders more torx*

had an idea that needed a bunch of weather forecast data, hacked it together using the US NWS API, getting so many 500s I am slightly concerned that I melted a government server somewhere

provide bulk data dumps you dummies

@mlsn future Em is going to be so fucking confused if she ever tries to set up wordpress

@mlsn Done :D I went with 100MB of '<'. 100MB to not waste so much of my own bandwidth (gzip is bad; you wouldn't think gzip | gzip would do anything but it does), '<' because that sounds like it might crash an HTML parser somewhere.

I set up a camera pointed at my printer yesterday, just in time to generate a time lapse of it running out of plastic and moving around uselessly for 6 hours last night

HTML is when you put pictures and words together, and it is not possible

a picture is worth a thousand <span class="word">s

oh no, I just realized something: HTML gets more bloated over time. Image compression improves over time. There will come a day, if it hasn't already, when - even with an ad blocker - it is actually more bandwidth-efficient to share a screenshot than a link due to the sheer volume of meaningless container divs.

The solution is apparently to hold the power button down longer than anyone would ever think to do so

Bizarre week update, late Monday morning: had a weird stuck unkillable process on my work machine that showed up in /proc and htop but not ps, rebooted to get rid of it, machine claims to be rebooting any time now and will not even respond to holding the power button down

@JetlagJen not that I know of, but I would both use and contribute to a wiki of "how to do this normal human thing that I've never had to do before", with sections of regionally appropriate advice.

@drdnar @jacqueline recently did this to someone who wasn't familiar with the project's naming history, confused the hell out of them, highly recommended

@aburka @buzzyrobin you are now aware that a USB A plug fits perfectly into an ethernet port

it doesn't *work*, obviously, but it'll physically feel right and confuse the hell out of you for a moment

someone invent an inverse-crowdfunding site, where I can take money away from people with bad ideas